Diigo and Social Bookmarking

This week Kyle and I decided to investigate the website Diigo. This website is a social bookmarking page, which used “cloud” technology. Basically this means that anything you do on your account on the website you can access from anywhere and any computer. This is made possible because every time you save something to your account it is saved to Diigo’s servers, nothing is actually saved on your computer. “Cloud” computing is becoming more and more popular, which is evident by Microsoft’s relentless advertising campaign, but I digress. More importantly this technology is revolutionizing the easy through which people access information through technology.

 Diigo stands for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups, and Other stuff. To get started all you have to do is create an account on Diigo. Once you have an account you can now access your cloud based profile, where you can bookmark websites, and even access anything that other users are sharing with the public. To further the functionality of you need to download the diigo toolbar for your web browser. This toolbar allows you to highlight text on websites and even leave comments on post it notes, and as long as your signed into your account they will always show up on that webpage. This tool would become very useful in the classroom. For instance I could bring up a website on my classroom projector that I had visited with diigo. I could have pre-highlighted passages that I want the students to focus on. This tool would make it very easy for me to present websites to my students. I could then teach the students how to use diigo so that they could research from home, and then continue in school because of social bookmarking.  This website would also allow students to filter through all of their information, and highlight only what was important to them! I am sure there are plenty of other ideas on how to use this tool in the classroom, so I am inviting you to post your thought in the comment section for this blog!